Tie-Dyed

Well, I decided to stay home tonight instead of playing poker. I thought tonight I'd rather spend some time with Stephanie, since that time is few and far between. Steph had a creative outburst today, stemming from her purchase of a new sewing machine. She spent a couple hours doing some tie-dying, and the last few hours making a skirt from fabrics she bought Friday.

Regarding Tuesday's post, I found a printer that will print my blog in a hardcover, bookstore quality book for around $60. I thought that was a damn good deal considering everything else I've seen was around $40 for a 20 page book. This is for roughly 200 pages, which will be more than enough. I've also reserved the web address on blogger for "Photo a Day: 2008 Edition". I don't know if I will continue with this through next year, but I just wanted to make sure I had it. If I can keep this going indefinitely, it would be great to have books printed every year, sort of like a high school yearbook of my life. Who knows!

Another Poker Night

Tomorrow night I will again go to Gary's house for a little poker. This time it looks like we'll be playing just a small cash game, since the turnout probably won't be that great. It's hard to get a lot of people on a Saturday night when the weather is so nice. I actually prefer a cash game to tournament style when it comes to Texas Hold 'Em. While the potential winnings in a tournament game are typically much higher, a cash game allows you to play a little looser and take more risks. I've certainly won far more money in tournaments, but it always seems like I have more fun at the cash games.

Back to the Doctor

Well, it's been about a month since I last visited the doctor, and I haven't seen any improvement. I still have discomfort in my chest, difficulty breathing, and some coughing. Of all the potential things that the nurse practitioner said it could be, the most likely seems to be asthma. The inhaler really helps, but only for about an hour, then all the symptoms return. She told me that there are medications that will last throughout the day, so that will probably be what I get from all this. Unfortunately, my crap health insurance doesn't cover office visits or prescription meds. The last visit, with the prescriptions, cose me nearly $170. Hooray for illness!

Strays

Our small town is filled with stray cats. With all the farmhouses on the outskirts, the population is on a steady upswing. We also have a neighbor that we feel may actually be an animal hoarder. I'm sure that's probably way off base, but the guy always seems to be surrounded by cats. Every year another of his animals has a litter, and the whole process starts over again. This year there was three kittens, and I'm quite certain they're related to our cat Cotton. Cotton was a stray that we rescued, and I've seen cats around town that look very much like him. We'd love to take care of all of them, but it's just not possible.

Empty Albums

I know I've talked about this before, but one of my pet-peeves about digital photography is that I rarely, if ever, have prints made. I was listening to one of my favorite podcasts at work last night, when the host, Leo Laporte, was talking about things we grew up with that are no longer around. The one thing he talked about that really resonated with me was the photo album. With photo hosting sites like flickr, it is far easier to show and view our photos than ever before. These sites are great and convenient, but there's no replacing the sensation of holding a print (or a book of them) in your hands. I started thinking about that in relation to this blog. What's going to happen after the year is up? It's very likely that I will continue to do something very similar to this, but what happens in 20 years after the fact? 30 years? Will Blogger be around then, still preserving my year of photographs and writing? It's not likely. I've been seriously considering, after the year is up, having the entire blog, photos included, printed in book form so I have something physical I can pick up and look at 30 years from now. I just think it's important that I preserve this year of my life in something more permanent and secure than a couple websites. Can anyone recommend a service that does things like this?

Favorite Shots #9: More Wedding Stuff

Since I've shot about 550 pictures in the last three days, and frankly, I'm really sick of my camera right now, I thought I'd put up one of my favorite wedding shots. The above shot was one of those "happy accidents". For some reason, the camera metered off the window behind the couple instead of the couple themselves, and the result was this beautiful silhouette. This is one of those things that you're really happy to get, but it can frustrate me to know that it was a total accident. Fortunately, when these things happen, you learn that not only is it possible to get these shots, you learn how they can be done.

Hi Rich!

Editing

Now comes the fun part! Now I will take the roughly 500 photos I shot yesterday, look through them with iPhoto, pull the good ones into Photoshop, and do any touch-up work that is required. For all the formal shots, I usually take three of each so I know I'll have one good one. You want to account for people blinking, not smiling, etc, plus you want to take a shot exposed correctly, one that's overexposed, and one that's underexposed, just in case your meter isn't quite reading correctly. It's a lot of shots to take, but when you're shooting digital and you don't use up any film, so who cares, right? The iPhoto is something I'm really using for the first time, and unfortunately for you PC users, it's only on the Mac. It allows me to easily import all my photographs from the memory cards, then look through them all and decide which ones I'll run through Photoshop. I used to pull them all into Photoshop, but this is much easier. I really love it. It will take me about a week to go through all the pictures, sice I prefer to process them in bite-sized chunks. It would be far too tedious to do them all at once, and I really want to do the best job I can. I do admit, however, that as tedious as this part can be, looking at all the shots for the first time with digital is a close as you can get to the excitement of cracking open that envelope of fresh prints and seeing all the shots you took with your film camera. It's not quite the same, but it's close.